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Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer
Garth Risk Harvey, with some major help from his many photographer friends and designers Christopher D. Salyers and Eliane Lazzaris, has created a unique book in A Field Guide to the North American Family
This completely fascinating ‘novel’ is a compendium of brief one-page thoughts titled alphabetically and matched with a photograph that illuminates the words written.
And as if this weren’t clever enough, the entire book is a marvel of design, taking the form of a notebook one would take on a journey, a collection of musings, paraphernalia, variations in paper types and typefaces, and printed in such a way that the reader feels almost guilty about opening the cover of someone’s private diary, so intimate is the structure and the content.
This is an art book - but it is so very much more.
Hallberg subtitles his book ‘Concerning chiefly the Hungates and Harrisons, with accounts of their habits, nesting, dispersion, etc., and full description of the plumage of both adult and young, within a taxonomic survey of several aspects of family life’.
Keying his narrative to a history of two North American families of four members each on Long Island who have interacted as neighbors through similar marriages and early family life until the father of one family dies, and act that alters the way each of these people reveal their old and newly won idiosyncrasies in their reaction to love, death, material goods, habits, fidelity and infidelity, grief, divorce, angst and many other transitions that go bump in their lives.
The writing is terse, many times profound, always fascinating and always challenging to the reader who must decide how to approach this field guide - whether to read each excerpted page at random, read the pages alphabetically annotated as to the entries, or follow the subtext by means of the cross-referenced listings under the telling captions of each photograph. This is a book in which the reader’s involvement is an active part of the conceptual creation of the author. And it works on every level.
Hallberg is a sensitive observer of human foibles and responses: Hallberg also just happens to be a superb writer! On LOVE: ‘Though hardly the most visible member of its kingdom, Love has never been as endangered as alarmists would have us believe. Without it, now research confirms, the entire Family would cease to function.’(caption under a lonely night street photograph). And in a prayer offered after a death in a section called Youth, ‘And look out for her family, and while you’re are it, or her mom and Tommy anyway - I don’t know what happens to dead people…And everyone in hospitals all over the world, because, you might as well know, hospitals suck and smell bad. And everyone who lives where there’s war or no money…And everyone who ever got hurt.’ etc. The book could be quoted form every entry, so excellent is the consistent quality of the writing and mood swings.
Though this is not the first ‘illustrated novella’ to be published (many of WG Sebald’s books used random photographs, and Nick Bantock’s ‘Griffin and Sabine’ series made fine use of art, for example), this book is designed as such a total concept that reading it is addictive. It would be easy to imagine that many readings or perusings would be necessary to fully understand the complexities of the families Hungate and Harrison as shared by Hallberg’s technique of storytelling. A FIELD GUIDE ultimately tells us a lot about ourselves. It only asks that the reader be vulnerable enough to think and learn and transfer, and even perhaps return to the lost art of diary writing. Highly recommended.
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